| These articles are not intended to be a master source
for everything one must consider (and how to prioritize them) when scoring
a game, rather it will be a series of articles based off my experiences
with each newly completed project. As I learn from the process, the other
developers that are involved, and write about the experiences here, I
hope the information will help better guide your future scoring efforts
for games.
Hello Again! It’s been a little while since I’ve written
one of these articles, but I just finished scoring a new game and learned
quite a bit from the experience that many fellow Game Composers may find
useful. The game is called “Cities
of Legend” and it’s a Social Game for Facebook based off
the New York Times bestseller, “Legend”
by Author Marie Lu (Developed by Wicked
Sweet Games & Published by CBS Films). I’ve worked on Flash
games for Facebook before, but have never had the opportunity of creating
the “Audio World” for an established IP. That in and of itself
was quite a fun challenge, but I also learned a few other things I’d
like to share on what a Composer should keep in mind when scoring for
games.
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I. Platform Constraints
This is the third article in this series and the first subject of each
one has been about Platform Constraints. It is so tightly knit to video
games and the direct performance of your music system, that I’m
fully expecting to learn something new on each project (especially considering
there are so many platforms to create games for!). “Cities of Legend”
is a flash game for Facebook, so I’d like to talk a little bit about
some of the constraints we had to work around.
First and foremost, people expect the loading times for their Facebook
games to be minimal. The longer it takes your game to load, the higher
the probability of the player just closing the window and ignoring your
game altogether. This expectation directly limits the amount of music
(and quality at which it’s being played back at) you can have in
your game. For “Cities of Legend” we decided on three Sixty
(60) second loops for: The Rebels Home, The Republic Home, and Combat/Mini-Game.
Another factor that limited us to three music tracks was Flash’s
inability to create a basic interactive music system. Rather than spending
our time trying to force the engine into something it’s not familiar
with, we decided to invest our time into reinforcing the most important
moments in the game with strong, thematic music that can easily loop.
My friend and talented Composer, Gerard
Marino, shared his way of thinking about music loops with me a while
ago. I’m going to paraphrase a bit here, but he basically said,
“If you only have a minute of music to work with and that minute
is going to be looped over and over again, put so much detail and interest
in that single minute that the player can hear something new each time
it repeats.”
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I directly applied this concept to the music of “Cities
of Legend” and ultimately it does a better job of reinforcing the
game world than a few ambient loops would. It may be harder to pick out
the looping point for Ambient tracks, but we felt that approach wouldn’t
be appropriate for a game of this size. The whole game flow is very fast
and Ambient tracks (in that short of a time frame) have nothing to add
or say to the game. Which conveniently moves us to the next subject...
II. Get to the Point
Not all games feature a twenty-hour single player campaign that develops
your hero from rags to riches. So the “Symphonic Composer”
mindset of taking your time to cleverly develop your motifs in unique
ways over longer periods of time may be completely ineffective (depending
on the style, game play, demographic, etc.).
While “Legend” (the Novel) is rich with detail and must take
its time to dramatically crescendo, “Cities of Legend” (the
Social Game) is meant to hastily throw the player in the world and have
them immediately grasp almost everything that’s going on. Even if
the player is unfamiliar with the world, within the first minute of playing
they should understand the following: Pick a side to fight for, understand
the function of the UI, and realize how to jump into battle. So as the
Composer, we initially have about a minute to help reinforce or describe
the tone of the faction they chose to fight for. After that amount of
time, the player will most likely jump into a battle.
So we have a minute, what can we say in that amount of time?
Early on we decided that each faction (Republic vs Rebels) should have
their own designated theme, instrumentation, and overall tone. I had read
“Legend” before working on the score, but meeting with the
Producer and Author was very helpful. For the sake of organization, I’ll
provide a visual breakdown of how I determined which various musical elements
I assigned to each faction.
(Click image for larger version)
III. Work your Themes into Trailers or Promo Videos
I mentioned in the previous section that developing your motifs over
the course of a game may not be the best option (or even possible) in
some scenarios. However, if you’re able to negotiate and work on
the Trailers/Promo Videos (and have time to Compose the necessary themes
before the trailers are released) this is a good place to do it.
Rather than just writing stereotypical trailer music that would just
serve to move the action along, I was able to sneak in bits and pieces
of each theme (Rebel & Republic) in our various Trailers. Furthermore,
I was able to “stamp” the ending logo with the Rebel motif,
which just so happened to align with the overall tone of the first novel
(and thus served well as a “Main motif”). I found that this
was not only musically satisfying, but helped establish the world of “Legend.”
This is especially effective since you won’t hear those themes (or
probably that same combination of sounds/instruments together) anywhere
else.
Trailer
1 (Republic theme sneak in)
Trailer
2 (Rebel theme sneak in)
I thoroughly enjoyed my time working on the “Cities of Legend”
and would highly recommend both the game and novel to anyone interested
in near future dystopias with strong characters. Thanks for reading fellow
Game Composers and I hope you’ve found this useful!
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